Everyman

a new adaptation by Carol Ann Duffy

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 27 April 2015

The late-mediaeval morality play has been adapted and expanded by the current Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It is directed by Rufus Norris, the new Artistic Director of the National Theatre, and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Everyman, Kate Duchêne as God (and Good Deeds), Dermot Crowley as Death and Penny Layden as Knowledge.

The play opens with Everyman falling slowly from the fly gallery of the Olivier theatre into a pit created in the drum revolve - curiously, the reverse of the poignant conclusion of the opera 'Between Worlds' which I saw a couple of days previously. The two pieces both deal with the unexpected but inevitable confrontation with death, but in 'Everyman' the emphasis is on a personal 'reckoning' with God, which in turn requires a searching self-reckoning as Everyman, totally unprepared, confronts his maker.

The state of Everyman's life is indicated by a (perhaps overlong) hedonistic 40th birthday party, replete with drink and drugs. While Everyman lies in a stupor, God, manifested as a somewhat exhausted and exasperated cleaner in the club venue, calls upon Death to tell Everyman that the reckoning is required. 

The familiar reactions to facing death occur - denial, anger, bargaining - as Everyman realises his whole style of life has left him in a very poor moral position. His friends melt away, his family is of no help, his goods are only of use in this world, but not the next (the snappy jargons of advertising snapped off in the crisis), his good deeds are pitifully weak. Only Knowlege offers to be a guide, but she is weary, cynical, and presented as an inebriated down-and-out, reflecting Everyman's parlous superficiality. Even as his senses and pleasure in bodily existence fade in the face of death, Everyman speaks at last simply and affectingly of his belief in the existence of his soul, and God accepts him in love. But Death is still at loose in the world.

The vast space of the Olivier theatre is well used to dramatise what is in some ways a very interior play, which could be seen as taking place entirely within Everyman's mind. The cast of friends at the beginning reappear later in masks as he senses and wits; the encounter with the family is both bruising and poignant (the Mother trails her oxygen tank, the Father is demented, and the Sister brimming with resentment and anger); the brittle glamour of the Goods contrasts with the squalor in which good Deeds and Knowledge are trapped.

The play has been modernised to the extent that the language is not fusty, but its moral framework remains virtually unquestioned - indeed it could not survive if this were not taken seriously. The principal additions involve explicit references to Everyman's heedless treatment of the planet - an ecological awareness that would not have been vailable to the mediaeval mind - and a scene in which Everyman watches himself as a boy.

The cast perform well. Chiwetel Ejiofor carries the main burden with an impressive range, while Kate Duchêne is a plausible deity even in a cleaner's smock. Dermot Crowley presents Death with a comedian's turn that dangerously masks an implacable force in our lives. The vignette in which Everyman meets his family is rendered more powerful by the situation in which the parents are imagined - an unforced illustration of the modern tensions in family life giving emotional resonance to a generic situation. This is a successful modern reworking of a play perhaps now half a millennium old.